


what we make for ourselves

by sequestering



Category: Tenet (2020)
Genre: Fix-It, Gen, Heavily inspired by Sarah Connor, M/M, Neil is Max, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-30
Updated: 2020-08-30
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:09:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26196169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sequestering/pseuds/sequestering
Summary: Kat has spent her whole life doubting. For so long, for so many blasted miserable years, she doubted her strength and her will and her courage. Now, she knows better.She knows that she met her son.(or: Kat has twenty-five years to save her son. She's not going to waste them.)
Relationships: Kat & Neil (Tenet), Neil/The Protagonist (Tenet)
Comments: 25
Kudos: 164





	what we make for ourselves

**Author's Note:**

> Huge thanks to H and J for being time travel consultants.
> 
> This is based on the theory that Neil is grown-up Max. I refer to The Protagonist as John. I know, I know, but it's really damn hard to write outside POV fic about people without names. I don't know the fandom convention for this.
> 
> Edit: This now has a [Russian translation](https://ficbook.net/readfic/9898251/25471446) done by the amazing [schadie](https://schadie.tumblr.com/).
> 
> CW: canon-typical action, references to canon-typical domestic abuse.

Kat spends two weeks not thinking about Tenet. She doesn't think about any of it, not time travel or plutonium or soldiers in combat fatigues.

She walks Max to school, holds his hand, and listens to his happy chatter. She kisses him goodnight, wakes him in the morning, takes him to the park for ice cream, and keeps all her promises. She watches as Max gets lighter, more trusting, as his serious little laugh become bright, uncontrollable giggles.

She spends two weeks in that beautiful dream world, living the kind of impossible fantasy she used to imagine for herself when she lay desperate and despairing next to Andrei.

Then she gives it up.

Kat is not a perfect mother. Perhaps she is a not even a good mother. But she knows her son.

* * *

Memory is always difficult. Memory formed in a fog of morphine and pain and inverted time is something else entirely.

Kat knows that she spent two weeks moving backwards through time in a shipping container. She knows that she was dying from a bullet in the gut. She knows that she was accompanied by two men.

Trying to remember the rest, to shape it into pictures and words is hopeless; memories slide like water through her fingers, rippling and distorting and impossible to grasp. The key, Kat finds, is not to force them, but to wait, to catch flickering images as they rise to the surface, to hoard glimpses of faces and snippets of conversation.

There had been John, whose name she wouldn't learn until much later, all quiet concern and watchful eyes. She had watched him back from under pain-heavy eyelids, angry and hurting and betrayed, and still she had watched him. He had been magnetic, irresistible, hard to look away from, not because she was afraid to, but because she didn't want to.

Then there had been Neil. 

Some days Kat thinks that Neil had honey-blond hair, the colour of her mother's in her youth. Other days she would swear blind that it was the soft auburn of a chestnut tree. She remembers thinking it was beautiful.

She thinks he was tall, fawn-like limbs and long fingers. She likes to think he was, that he took that much from her. But perhaps he simply looked tall from where she was lying on a stretcher, watching him bent over next to John.

She thinks that he was kind. He was certainly conscientious, a natural medic, who kept an eye on her saline drip and the stark red bleeding across her bandages, but also on the spread of her blankets and covers.

He had seemed intelligent, too. She'd listened as John and Neil talked about paradoxes and alternate realities and inversions, as Neil's low voice rose and fell. It wasn't the genius of Andrei's byzantine manipulations, but it was a quiet, hard-won intelligence of its own.

She goes over those flickers of memory again and again, handling them until they're smooth and familiar: the man her Max will become.

* * *

She knows that her certainty is absurd. How could she know her son, twenty, thirty years from now? How can she be so sure, when she barely remembers the colour of the man's eyes?

She watches the way Max smiles, just that little bit lopsided. She watches as he draws a sky full of planets across his bedroom walls, chattering excitedly about the universe. Others might say that the similarity is superficial, fleeting, the product of a mind seeing what it wants to see. But Max looks at her, eyes focused and heavy brows furrowed, and she is certain that there is no self-deception.

Anyway, Kat has had enough of doubting.

She has spent her whole life doubting. For so long, for so many blasted miserable years, she doubted her strength and her will and her courage. Now, she knows better.

She knows that she met her son.

* * *

Here's something else she remembers: Neil didn't say goodbye.

After Kat dove into the sea and laughed out her freedom to the ocean, after Mahir drove them back to shore with Andrei's bloated body carving a swathe through the waves behind them, she was sent to a small warehouse in Toulouse. The next few weeks were a series of safe-houses, killing time until the night of the ill-fated plutonium heist, until she could walk into their London house and call the police to report her husband missing.

A month spent in hiding is a long time.

There was a lot of crying, full-bodied heaving sobs that left her wrung-out and exhausted. There were nightmares that left her waking soaked with sweat in her own bed, with Andrei thousands of miles away charging into a doom of his own making. There was also freedom. Not the kind she would have in the future, the freedom to go wherever she wants, whenever she wants, with whoever she wants, but a freedom nonetheless. She got up when she wanted, ran on a treadmill until her body ached and her face puffed up an unattractive red, read the kind of books that Andrei would have ripped up, and watched all the Terminator movies.

She also got visitors from Tenet's rotating cast of soldiers, spies and smugglers. Ives came through once, gruff and uninterested in doing more than sleeping for twelve hours straight. Wheeler was a regular, loud and irreverent and happy to tell Kat stories that put her hair on end - a woman who missed the last turnstile and got trapped inverted, a man who fused with his past self into a deformed pile of flesh. Even John appeared a few times, never seeming to give advance warning or to need to be let in.

But no Neil.

Kat came up with dozens of possible explanations. Many were good, likely even. Many were less good.

She saw that battlefield, the bodies littered across sand dunes, limbs sticking out grotesquely from piles of rubble. This is a war, and wars have casualties. Bright, brilliant boys with intelligent eyes and kind smiles are no more immune to bullets than anyone else.

* * *

Neil had been young. She is sure of that. Mid to early thirties, she would guess, certainly no older than forty. Too young to die.

Two weeks to the day that she reports Andrei missing, Kat kisses Max goodbye at the school gates. She watches him run towards the playground's small climbing frame, throwing his bag aside and swinging himself onto the monkey-bars, hair glinting in the weak morning sun. Her baby boy, who is going to live his life slipping between timestreams, who is going to give his life to save the world and ask for nothing in return.

Kat turns back towards the car. She knows where to find answers, and it's not in this fantasy life.

* * *

In some ways, John is a lot like Andrei. They have the same confidence, the same single-mindedness, the same minds that work on a level Kat can barely imagine. In her darkest moments, in those fears she can barely tell her therapist, she worries that that's what drew her to him, that there's something wrong with her.

But in so many other ways, John is nothing like Andrei. She read enough about the Oslo break-in to know that there were no casualties, no fall-guy, no expendables. That isn't something that happens by accident, that requires planning and effort and a sacrifice of efficiency. John is a lot of things, and one of those is kind.

That's why Kat knows that he'll come when she calls.

She arranges Max a playdate with the child of a Ukrainian diplomat, the kind of family who is willing to sacrifice respectability for the advantages of wealthy friends. Then she books a room at the Rosewood. It is not what she would usually go for, dimly lit with only one small window and a terrible view; for this, though, it is perfect.

The message she leaves on the phone is a room number and the hotel name. Then she settles in to wait.

John must know that there is unlikely to be any real danger; not when she is alone in a room she booked for herself. He comes anyway. He is a good man, and he would not risk her safety to chance.

"Kat," he says, eyes careful, hand in his jacket where she knows a gun is holstered. "Always a pleasure."

"It's good to see you," she says, just as careful. "Your wardrobe's improved." It's true; his £5000 dollar suit no longer stinks of new money and hasty acquisition. He looks older, too, older perhaps than could be explained by the two months since she last saw him.

There's a pause, the only sound the low, distant rumble of London traffic.

"You know," he says finally, taking a seat on the sofa opposite her. "That phone isn't intended for social calls."

She takes a sip from her glass. It's only water, but it gives her something to do with her hands, to keep her focused. "What happened to Neil?" she asks, and there's no tremble in her voice, nothing to betray the way her heart is pounding in her chest.

John looks at her, his dark eyes unreadable. If he is surprised by the question, he doesn't let on. "He's dead."

It's strange. Kat had thought it would hurt more, confirmation of her son's death; young, brave and beautiful, fighting to save the world, dying for his father's crimes. She tries the words in her head: her son is dead. She will go home, hold him close, smell his baby-soft hair, and know that his corpse is rotting in a pile of Russian rubble.

The grief isn't the hot agony of losing a parent, it is ice cold. It claws at her throat, freezes her breath, and numbs the bleeding of her heart. It does not paralyse, it steels.

"How?" she asks, and the question scrapes her throat raw.

"Stalask-12," John says. "He went in inverted, took a bullet for me."

She wonders abstractly if he knows how much his words sound like a confession.

"He got us to the algorithm," John continues, never dropping her gaze. "Without his actions, we'd be living through Armageddon."

She should be proud; she is proud, achingly proud of her son who grew into a hero. She loves him so fiercely she could burst from it, this strange young man who is and isn't Max. But she shouldn't have to be proud. He died for Andrei's selfishness, Andrei's greed, Andrei's unthinkable evil, and he shouldn't have had to. That wasn't his cross to bear. That should not have been his cross to bear. The anger rises up, so thick and choking she can barely speak.

"You can time-travel," she says, and she can't hide the shake in her voice. "You can time-travel, you can save him."

John shakes his head. "It's a fixed point in time," he says, gentle. "It's done. There's nothing I can do."

"Bullshit," she spits. "There's always something."

"Not this time," John says, and his voice is heavy with something Kat can't name. "Neil made his decision. He was a soldier, he knew what he was doing, he knew what he was risking. We have to respect that."

Kat's crying now, furious tears running freely down her face. "Respecting his sacrifice does not mean letting him die," she says, and the words are clear, glass-sharp with anger despite the crying. "There must be something."

John hesitates. It's not a lot. If Kat hadn't spent years on a knife edge, watching for any flicker of temper on Andrei's expressionless face, she wouldn't have noticed. But she notices; the slightest of pauses before his face shutters.

"It's a fixed point," John repeats, shaking his head. "It can't be changed, not without risking the whole operation." The worst part is that the regret in his voice sounds like truth.

Kat presses her lips together, swallows back the scream that's sitting on her tongue.

"I'm sorry, Kat," he says, getting to his feet. "What's happened, happened." It has the ring of mantra.

The door clicks shut behind him, and Kat sits alone in the hotel room. She sits there, alternately sobbing and raging until the tears and grief harden into anger.

Andrei has taken enough. He will not take this, too.

**Author's Note:**

> I am on [tumblr](https://sequestering.tumblr.com/). Come talk to me about this beautiful, brainbending mess of a film.
> 
> Comments are adored.


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